Stanford University surgeon Norman Shumway, a wise-cracking, dedicated medical pioneer who is widely regarded as the father of heart transplant surgery, died Friday of cancer one day after his 83rd birthday, a university spokeswoman says.

Norman Shumway was the first surgeon to perform a heart transplant operation in the United States.

Stanford file, 1967

Working first in dogs and then in people, Shumway developed techniques now used widely in about 2,000 heart transplants nationwide each year. At first, most patients died of organ rejection or infections, but Shumway remained confident that he could solve those problems and transform heart transplantation into a routine operation.

"He remained an ardent investigator at a time when cardiac transplantation went into the doldrums," says his friend and fellow surgeon, Denton Cooley of the Texas Heart Institute. "Norman went on working."

Heart surgery was in its infancy when Shumway began his work. But many surgeons, inspired by Joseph Murray's successful transplantation of a human kidney in 1954, began experimenting on procedures to transplant other organs, including the liver, lung, pancreas and bowel, says Canadian historian Shelley McKellar, of the University of Western Ontario, who is working on a book about the artificial heart and iron lung.

Shumway and his colleague Richard Lower reported the first successful heart transplant in a dog in 1960. The dog survived for 21 days. By 1965, the two surgeons had kept animals alive for eight months. In 1966, Lower transplanted a heart from a human cadaver into a chimp. The heart functioned until Lower euthanized the chimp and terminated the experiment.

AP, 2003

Shumway

By 1967, Shumway and Lower, who had moved to the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond, were ready to try to transplant a human heart, McKellar says. They were thunderstruck on Dec. 3, 1967 when the news broke that a South African surgeon, Christiaan Barnard, had transplanted a young woman's heart into the chest of 55-year-old Louis Washkansky. He lived for 18 days.

Shumway knew Barnard. The two had trained together at the University of Minnesota, where Barnard initially studied a new procedure for clearing intestinal obstructions under the famed surgeon Owen Wangensteen. Then Barnard heard that Shumway was carrying out interesting heart experiments.

"Chris came in and observed Norm for a few days, spent a month or so with Dick Lower in Richmond and then went (home) and did a case," says Vincent Gott, an emeritus professor at Johns Hopkins University.

The news made Barnard an instant celebrity; other surgeons rushed to try the new procedure. Just three days after the first transplant, Adrian Kantrowitz performed the first infant-to-infant transplant at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn. On Jan. 2, 1968, Barnard made headlines again, by transplanting a heart into 58-year-old Philip Blaiberg. Shumway's first transplant, the world's fourth, came on Jan. 6, 1968. His patient, Mike Kasperak, 54, lived just 15 days after the surgery.

But soon dismal success rates prompted most surgeons to abandon it. Not Shumway. For a decade, while other surgeons went on to other things, he experimented with ways to reduce the risk of rejection.

He was one of the first transplant surgeon to begin using the anti-rejection drug cyclosporine, which dramatically improved the operation's success rate. Now about 80% of patients survive for three years.

In 1981, Shumway and Bruce Reitz performed the world's first successful combined heart-lung transplant in 45-year-old advertising exec Mary Gohlke, who lived five years and wrote a book about the experience.

Shumway was born in Kalamazoo, Mich., and served in the Army from 1943 to 1946. He also served in the Air Force from 1951 to 1953, Stanford spokeswoman Ruthann Richter says. He earned his medical degree from Vanderbilt University in 1949 and doctorate from the University of Minnesota in 1956.

He arrived at Stanford in 1958 as a surgery instructor and remained at the university for the rest of his career.